According to a recent survey in January's B2B Marketing Magazine "telemarketing remains a key part of the marketing mix for most B2B brands".

Unfortunately, the report doesn't specify the size of businesses surveyed, although I suspect most are medium and large sized companies since only 15% of the respondents relied entirely on external telemarketing agencies and "the largest portion of respondents had an internal telemarketing team"

It was interesting that the most popular reason why telemarketing was retained internally was because "the complexity of products and services makes outsourcing difficult".

The best way of thinking about this is to consider why these companies see keeping telemarketing in-house for complex sales proposition easier than outsourcing.

In my view, the primary reason why it would be seen as difficult to outsource telemarketing is the quality of the telemarketers.

Let's be honest, even the best call centres struggle retaining their people. They have one of the highest rates of employee churn than any other industry. If you have a complex sales proposition then you need to invest in training your telemarketers plus they have to be a pretty high-calibre to start with.

Therefore, when you outsource your telemarketing you run the risk of having to train and re-train telemarketers. Retention is always the biggest issue.

If you're a large company you can avoid this simply by hiring your own telemarketers and paying them above the industry average. Most good telemarketers in call centres would jump at the chance to get out.

Simply put, it is too difficult for most small businesses to manage and retain top-class telemarketers.

So if you have a complex product or service, what are your options?

The answer is to find a telemarketing agency that retains the caliber of telemarketers you need. Almost always, this will be a small agency rather than a large call centre.

If a telemarketing agency starts talking about having 100's of employees with account managers, systems, processes, etc then you can guarantee that they're a volume body shop.

However, if they're a small outfit who can provide you with personal direct access to the telemarketers making the calls, and will invest time in training their people to understand your proposition then you're on the right track.

But then again, if you're reading this blog post then you've already found us :-)

We know that businesses opt for outsourcing having efficiency and quantity on sales in mind. However, problem sets in when telemarketers these telemarketing outsource provides became lacking in skills to sell the product of their client business, I certainly agree with you about that.

I guess the best solution for that would be to make sure that the b2b telemarketing company you would hire for your outsource sales operation only has the best telemarketers who are apt to learn fast about the various products you offer and are creative enough at talking sales or intelligent answering customer queries.